It was bound to happen sooner or later: Here's an inter-dimensional spaceship, breaking through the planet Xkyrzee 3, finally caught in Google's Street View. At least, that's what I believe it is.
Seriously, what the hell is this thing? Can anybody see what it may be, because I sure can't. [Google Street View via Geekologie]
In November, the chill and snow of a Northern Hemisphere winter is on the horizon. Snow covers the far north and high elevations, as shown in the map of percent snow cover in November 2009. White areas show where snow covers the ground completely, while blue points to areas with partial snow cover. At the peak of the northern winter, more than 40 percent of the Earth’s land will be covered in snow.
In addition to being an important, life-sustaining source of water, the snow also reflects sunlight, limiting the amount of heat the Earth absorbs from the sun.
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It's one of my pet peeves: Internet assclowns shouting "FAKE!" or "PHOTOSHOP!" while presented with any image that is unbelievably amazing. Like what is happening now with this stunning prize-winning photograph of a wolf jumping over a fence.
The photo was taken by Spanish photographer José Luís Rodriguez, who won the British Natural History Museum's annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year, which is awarded jointly with the BBC Wildlife magazine. He beat 43,000 photographers to get the $16,000 prize, but people in the Internet are claiming the whole thing is a fake. They say the wolf—whose name they say is Ossian—was really held in captivity, and the jump staged. Naturally, Rodriguez says those cries are false:
I have been a victim of a strong campaign of defamation on the part of a group of people - I presume photographers like myself - who have hidden behind internet nicknames. I can only say that the evidence that has been provided to support the claim that it is a captive wolf are unsubstantiated and that what should be examined is the veracity of this evidence and the way it has been gathered.
He said that it took him ages to find the right location, wait for the wolf—tempting him with meat—and take the photograph. I believe him. This is all internet bullshit. The wolf is not Ossian. It's clearly a computer-generated wolf, created in Autodesk's Maya and Pixar's Renderman. [Daily Mail]
NASA's Ames Research Center was launched 70 years ago as a high-speed aeronautics research laboratory as part of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and was named after NACA's chair, Joseph S. Ames. The center was the second NACA aeronautics research center in the United States.The world may have changed dramatically since 1939, but one thing remains constant: the center's bold spirit of innovation.
"History is made by those who are willing to take risks and break the mold," said S. Pete Worden, director of NASA Ames. "I’m proud to be a part of a center that has paved the way for advances in aeronautics and space travel, and I look forward to the next 70 years of innovation."
Jack Boyd joined Ames in 1947 and today serves as senior advisor to the center director as well as historian. Boyd recalls when R.T. Jones came up with the idea of a swept-wing.
"People thought he was crazy and would say, ‘birds’ wings aren’t shaped like that,’” said Boyd. “Well, birds also don’t fly too fast."
Today, the swept wing is now used on all high-speed aircraft.
In 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was formed and the center became NASA Ames Research Center. Boyd said a lot of the behind-the-scenes research going on at Ames during the 1950s and 1960s greatly contributed to the speed at which NASA was able to send a man to the moon by the end of the 1960s.
"The blunt-body concept and materials designed to withstand extreme heat for atmospheric reentry and a lunar guidance system all played a role in the successful Apollo missions," said Boyd. He added that Neil Armstrong practiced his lunar landings at Ames in the Vertical Motion Simulator.
The future looks bright for NASA Ames Research Center, with ongoing research converting algae to biofuel, developments in ‘green aviation’ and the construction of Sustainability Base—an environmentally friendly workspace that will have a platinum rating under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).
To commemorate NASA Ames’ platinum anniversary, Mountain View businesses are featuring exhibits of the center’s colorful history at 12 locations and a 70th anniversary banner hangs above Castro Street in downtown Mountain View.
January festivities include a panel of past center directors on Jan. 22, 2010 and a gala dinner on Jan. 23, 2010. William Ballhaus, a former center director and expert on computational fluid dynamics, and Nichelle Nichols, Lieutenant Uhura from Star Trek, will be guest speakers. Tickets for the dinner are $135 per person and include a three-course dinner and gift bag filled with a commemorative book, DVD and coin.
The 70th anniversary festivities conclude on Jan. 28, 2010 with a 1930s themed celebration, an antique car parade and a one-man play depicting the past innovators at Ames.
For more information on the history of NASA Ames, visit:
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The inner regions of young planet-forming disks offer information about how worlds like Earth form, but not a single telescope in the world can see them. Yet, for the first time, astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii have measured the properties of a young solar system at distances closer to the star than Venus is from our sun."When it comes to building rocky planets like our own, the innermost part of the disk is where the action is," said team member William Danchi at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Planets forming in a star's inner disk may orbit within its "habitable zone," where conditions could potentially support the development of life.
To achieve the feat, the team used the Keck Interferometer to combine infrared light gathered by both of the observatory's twin 10-meter telescopes, which are separated by 85 meters. The double-barreled approach gives astronomers the effective resolution of a single 85-meter telescope -- several times larger than any now planned.
"Nothing else in the world provides us with the types of measurements the Keck Interferometer does," said Wesley Traub at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "In effect, it's a zoom lens for the Keck telescopes."
In August 2008, the team -- led by Sam Ragland of Keck Observatory and including astronomers from the California Institute of Technology and the National Optical Astronomical Observatory -- observed a Young Stellar Object (YSO) known as MWC 419. The blue, B-type star has several times the sun's mass and lies about 2,100 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. With an age less than ten million years, MWC 419 ranks as a stellar kindergartener.
The team also employed a new near-infrared camera designed to image wavelengths in the so-called L band from 3.5 to 4.1 micrometers. "This unique infrared capability adds a new dimension to the Keck Interferometer in probing the density and temperature of planet-forming regions around YSO disks. This wavelength region is relatively unexplored," Ragland explained. "Basically, anything we see through this camera is brand new information."
The increased ability to observe fine detail, coupled with the new camera, let the team measure temperatures in the planet-forming disk to within about 50 million miles of the star. "That's about half of Earth's distance from the sun, and well within the orbit of Venus," Danchi said.
For comparison, the planets directly detected around the stars HR 8799, Fomalhaut and GJ 758 orbit between 40 and 100 times farther away.
The team reported temperature measurements of dust at various regions throughout MWC 419's inner disk in the Sept. 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Temperature differences help shed light on the inner disk's detailed structure and may indicate that its dust has different chemical compositions and physical properties, factors that may play a role in the types of planets that form. For example, conditions in our solar system favored the formation of rocky worlds from Mars sunward, whereas gas giants and icy moons assembled farther out.
In turn, the astronomers note, the size of the young star might affect the composition and physical characteristics of its dust disk. The team is continuing to use the Keck Interferometer in a larger program to observe planet-forming disks around sun-like stars.
The Keck Interferometer was developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the W.M. Keck Observatory. It is managed by the W.M. Keck Observatory, which operates two 10-meter optical/infrared telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii and is a scientific partnership of the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA. NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute manages time allocation on the telescope for NASA.
Related links:
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All systems are behaving as expected on NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), which rocketed into the sky just before dawn on Dec. 14 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The mission will undergo a one-month checkout before beginning the most detailed survey yet of the entire sky in infrared light. Hundreds of millions of objects will populate its vast catalog, including dark asteroids, the closest "failed" stars and tremendously energetic galaxies.Shortly after the space telescope reached its polar orbit around Earth on Dec. 14, it acquired the sun's position and lined up with its solar panels facing the sun. Engineers and scientists continue to check out the spacecraft's pointing-control system in preparation for jettisoning the instrument's cover, an event now scheduled for Dec. 29. With the cover off, WISE will get its first look at the sky.
The cover serves as the top to a Thermos-like bottle, called a cryostat, which chills the heat-sensitive infrared instrument. The instrument consists of a 40-centimeter (16-inch) telescope and four detectors, each with one million pixels. Just as a Thermos bottle keeps your coffee warm or your iced tea cold with a thin vacuum layer, a vacuum inside WISE's cryostat kept the instrument cold while it was on the ground.
The cover also prevents light from reaching the detectors, and protects the chilly interior of the instrument from heat that could have come about from unintentional pointing at Earth or the sun during launch. After WISE was pushed away from its rocket, it wobbled around slightly before stabilizing (a process that took surprisingly little time -- only 3 minutes). Without the cover, the heat from Earth or the sun would have shortened the time the cryostat keeps the instrument cold, and possibly damaged the detectors.
Now that WISE is steadily perched in the vacuum of space, it will no longer need the instrument cover; in fact, space will provide an even better vacuum. Engineers are preparing to pop the cover by making sure the pointing-control system is functioning properly. Once everything has been checked out, they will send a signal to fire pyrotechnic devices, releasing nuts that are clamping the cover shut. Three springs will then push the lid away and into an orbit closer to Earth than that of the spacecraft.
The WISE team has also verified that the instrument is as cold as planned. The cryostat's outer shell is slightly below the planned 190 Kelvin (minus 83 degrees Celsius, or minus 117 degrees Fahrenheit), and the coldest of the detectors is less than 8 Kelvin (minus 265 degrees Celsius, or minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit).
All spacecraft systems are functioning normally, and both the low- and high-rate data links are working properly. The instrument's detectors are turned on, and though they are currently staring into the backside of the instrument cover, they will soon see the light of stars. WISE's first images will be released within one month after its one-month checkout.
JPL manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise, http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise.
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Kindly tell me which specialization of electrical engineering is better & have more scope?
1- Electrical power engg.
2- Electrical electronics engg.
We have some hydraulic tank lids which have oil level switches, the reed switch kind.
When the fabricator cuts holes in the tank lids using plasma the lids are magnetised which effects the operation of the level switches.
Does anyone know a method of removing the magnetic field?
Regar
Ah, Balloon Boy. It happened barely two months ago, yet it already seems ready to show up on an I Love the 00s nostalgia-fest. Anyway, Balloon Boy's a-hole parents just got hit with a $42,000 bill for the stunt.
The tab covers the local, state and federal agencies that were called in to deal with the hoax, and seems kind of steep (do fire engines take some sort of special $10,000 per gallon gas or something?) but maybe there's a premium for captivating the nation with idiocy. However, the Heenes aren't about to pay the fine without a fight—their lawyer insists upon seeing precise documentation before paying a cent, which is reasonable. Let's hope this is the last we hear of poor, puking Balloon Boy until he writes his tell-all memoir in ten years. [Denver Post]
i receive iss file, please advise what software this file created.
Thanks to a clandestine meeting with a source, I got a chance to play with and try out the Nexus One. It's basically, from my time with it, Google's Droid killer. It's thin, it's fast, it's better in every way.
My source was very firm about no photography, and I didn't want to jeopardize anything on my source's end, so there are no photos, hence these photos are ones we've already shown you. But, based on all the leaked shots this week, plus the very pretty and very clear one last week from Boy Genius, everyone knows what the phone looks like already. Hell, there's even a complete UI walkthrough today that's on YouTube. So I'm going to focus on the experience, and how it compares to the Droid and the iPhone 3GS.
The Nexus One is slightly thinner than the iPhone 3GS, and slightly lighter. No hard specs were thrown around, unfortunately, since Google didn't even let people who they gave the phone to know that. The back is definitely not cheap and plasticky, like the iPhone's backing, and feels like some sort of rubbery material. So, not smooth like the iPhone, but not as rubbery as the Droid. It's halfway in-between.
You can call the design the antithesis of the Droid: smooth, curved, and light, instead of hard, square and pointy. It feels long and silky and natural in your hand—even more so than the iPhone 3GS. There are also three gold contacts on the bottom designed for future docking (possibly charging?) use, but there aren't any accessories available for the phone now. It plugs in via microUSB at the moment.
Even though the screen is the same size and same resolution as the Droid, it's noticeably better. The colors are much more vibrant and the blacks are blacker, as evidenced by putting both side by side and hitting up various websites and loading various games. The pinks on Perez Hilton and the blues on Gizmodo just popped a lot more on the N1, and made the Droid (which was actually considered to have a great screen) seem washed out. The same feeling carries over when you compare the Nexus with the iPhone 3GS. And it's pretty damn bright, compared to the other two phones.
This is probably the best screen we've seen on a smartphone so far. Probably.
Google just gave Motorola (and Verizon) a swift shot to the TSTS, because the Nexus One is astonishingly faster than the Droid. The speed dominance was most evident when we compared the loading of webpages, but even when you're just scrolling around, launching apps and moving about the OS, you could tell that there's a beefier brain inside the N1. I don't know the specs for sure, but there's talk of a 1GHz processor being inside, which would push it quite a ways above the 550MHz Arm A8 in Motorola's newest toy.
When comparing the three phones in loading a webpage over Wi-Fi, the Nexus One loaded first, the iPhone 3GS came in a few seconds later, and the Droid came in a little while after that. This was constant throughout many webpage loads, so it's indicative of something going on inside with the hardware.
I ran all three through a Javascript benchmark engine for some quantifiable numbers, and while the results were similar between the Nexus One and the iPhone 3GS, the Droid still came up at about 60% of the other two. Surprisingly enough, Mobile Safari on the iPhone scored better on the Javscript benches than the Nexus did, even though the Nexus was able to pull down and render actual web pages faster. Note that I didn't list actual numbers here, for privacy reasons.
You've no doubt heard about the animated video backgrounds, but they're actually more than just animations: you can interact with them.
The default background is the square/8-bit like one shown above, where lines of colored squares come in from different sides of the screen. What's neat (even if it is superfluous and battery draining) is that you can tap anywhere on the desktop in a blank space and trigger dots to spread out from your tap. Basically, press anywhere to cause blocks to fly outwards. The same thing happens in the "water" background, except instead of blocks, you cause ripples in the water.
What's also neat are the two virtual sound meters, which act as a visualizer for whatever music you're currently playing on your phone. There's one analog one that looks like one of the old ones with a red needle, and a "digital" one that looks similar to ones you see elsewhere. Sorta neat in itself, but it shows that the interactive backgrounds can actually interact with apps, as long as one knows the other's APIs.
The 5-megapixel camera is nice, and the flash works well enough for a flash on a phone, but it's not spectacular, as seen by early photos taken and uploaded online by Googlers. There is autofocus, and you activate it with the trackball on the face of the phone. There is no tap-to-focus as see on the iPhone 3GS.
There's no multitouch in the browser or in the map, but I think at this point that's more of a legal consideration than a technical one, since many phones that run Android have the capability of supporting multitouch on a hardware level.
Playing back music over the speakers sounded decent, but not great. It's definitely in need of a dock—like all smartphones—if you want to listen to music for a sustained period.
I didn't get a chance to call on it, because I wanted to keep this as anonymous as possible, and didn't want any sort of way to trace when I used the phone. From what other people say in their time with it, it functions fine as a phone, and should work as normally as other Android phones in the SMS/MMS department.
If Google's planning on releasing this phone as their official Google phone, it'll certify them as the premium Android phone brand out there right now. Even though it doesn't have a hardware keyboard, it basically beats the hell out of the Droid in every single task that we threw at it. And face it, some people didn't like the Droid's keyboard because it was too flush and the keys were too unseparated with each other. N1's onscreen keyboard felt fine, and the speedy processor made sure that each key was interpreted well.
But in the end, it's still an Android phone. If you want Android phones, this is the one to get, provided Google goes ahead with the rumored plans of either selling it themselves or partnering with T-Mobile in a more traditional role. Droid, shmoid; Nexus is the one you're looking for.
Image courtesy anonymous tipster
So like the Droid before it, the Cliq has been rooted. It's not ready for wholesale fun-making mods yet, however—it's not capable of handling new ROMs quite yet. But it will be, my friends. Mods like Cyanogen, Sense, and more should be coming soon, in case you're sick of Blur's Twitter interface being all up in YOUR face, nah mean? [Redmond Pie]
hi all,
just a post to say, MERRY CHRISTMAS & A HAPPY NEW YEAR!
those are the very words I hear and read since I can remember, this time of the year. couldn't be any better.
stay safe and enjoy the Holidays!
-- langyaw
gentlemen,
I am in need of AutoCAD material (tutorials or notes) preferably 2007. I need to start with the basics and progress from there. PDF will be advisable for easy download.
Can a someone out there be the solution to this?
all the best in the coming year!
bright.
I have to design a pressure relief valve, cracking pressure is 1000 psig & 10 GPM flow rate. How to calculate the orifice diameter and performance curves for the PRV? Which book should i refer for calculations? Thanks
I have an 05 dodge pickup that has a digital odometer that reads 'error' disconecting the battery does not reset it. Anyone out there familiar with this?
Holy friggin' hell! I don't know why I haven't seen this before, but apparently Norwegians eliminate hazardous rocks by having helicopters slam huge swinging balls against cliffs. I really hope I don't ever piss off a Norwegian. Geez!
Is this really the most effective way to do this? [via Ace of Spades HQ]
Is Methanol compatible with Valve's Bonnet Gasket: Graphite Laminate and Packing: Live-load PTFE? Please advise.
Thanks.
Alright, I need some help here. I've definitely been around the Internet quite a bit, but I don't think I can figure every single meme hidden in this picture. Like that poster to the right of Pedobear. What's that about?
You can click the image for a bigger version.
This is actually making me suspect that I've been lurking in all the wrong corners of the web, because I have no idea when House became a meme. [Flickr via Ace of Spades HQ via Neatorama]
how total air temperature is calculated using rtd
